Bertrand family saga, part 3

Time to talk about my siblings, in order of age, starting with the oldest.

I didn’t really connect with my sister Anne at all when I was a kid. It seemed like we lived in different universes. I remember being a little scared of her because she could be pretty scary when she was mad, and well, she’s a redhead, so this was not exactly a rare occurrence. But I was never scared enough not to like her or anything. I liked her fine. She always seemed so full of life and confidence and energy to me when I was a kid. I admired her for that.

But to me, all that energy and vivacity made her kind of unapproachable. And to her, presumably, I was just an annoying little kid seven years younger than her who got underfoot a lot.

I just wanted to be included.

Later in life, when I was in junior high and she was in college, we finally found some common ground. Namely, we are both intellectual people who love to talk. I got into astrology and that gave us a starting point for discussion, and eventually we would talk politics, philosophy, religion, feminism, and so on.

That was mostly good, but sometimes we would end up in this dead end situation where we would start arguing about something and neither of us could stop. We were both, in our own ways, too damned stubborn for our own goods. She would just keep trying to win the argument, growing increasingly upset and angry, and clueless nerd I would not notice how overwrought she was becoming and just keep arguing.

She was growing hysterical, and I was still enjoying myself. I was such a dick.

And of course, the fact that I was remaining cool and calm and unassailable only made her even more upset, and so we would get into a pretty bad loop. She would accuse me of being stubborn and close-minded. I would ask her to prove it without just assuming that her arguments were so good that only a close-minded stubborn person could resist them. She would say I wasn’t listening to her. I would say “Yes, I am, you are saying…. ” and then repeat all her points back at her, then conclude “I just don’t agree with you. ” For bonus points, sometimes I would point that she’s not changing her mind or backing down either, so obviously there is equal proof of being stubborn for both of us.

And so forth and so on. Often my mother would become very upset to see her children fight like this, which I also barely noticed because again, I was enjoying myself. I love a good argument and I have nearly unlimited stamina for one, or so it seems. And this was the kind of mental stimulation I didn’t get in my life back then.

Eventually, though, I figured out that one of us had to be willing to just stop that shit before it started, and I was the only one I had control of, so it had to be me. I would just bow out and change the subject. Sometimes that seemed unfair to her, like I was denying her some kind of victory, but eventually we both figured out what was good for us.

After all, this was just casual, non-binding conversation between two people who loved each other. And in those situations, “being right” is far, far less important than the relationship between you.

And besides, actual conversational victory is extremely rare, despite what our crazy dominance hormones tell us. So the chances are, all the argument can do at that point is damage your relationship with the person, and hurt them as well.

So in a way, she taught me to get the hell over myself.

My sister Catherine and I were never all that close either, although she periodically took it upon myself to be my teacher. Looking back, it’s quite touching and adorable the way she would assume the role of the kindly, encouraging teacher when she tried to teach me one of the crafts she learned in the craft-crazed Seventies (another way the Seventies are back), or get me to read her school assigned reading with her, or teach me a song.

Like I said, this was fairly sporadic, and like a lot of things from the Seventies, it ended in the Eighties. But I still greatly appreciate her taking time with me like that, and thanks to her, if I really concentrate, I can still recite “Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll and “Stopping By The Woods On A Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost, just like she taught me.

Fun fact : many years after the afternoon where she taught me those poems, I got an assignment to memorize two poems (possibly the same assignment she got, from the exact same teahcher!).

Guess which two poems I chose? That’s right, the two I already had memorized.

That was a freebie.

Later on, when she was in high school, it was I, the little brother, who began to worry about her. She was always an overachiever, although of course I didn’t know the term at the time, and like a lot of folks of that ilk, she put incredibly amounts of pressure on herself and was absolutely terrified of failure.

So she would have these emotional breakdowns when it all got to be too much for her poor nervous system, and have crying jags and freakouts and other problems that made me genuinely worried for her.

And that only got worse when she went to college. I would try in my own way to help by encouraging her to relax and calm down, but keeners and coasters just don’t speak the same emotional language at all. So I was not much help to her.

You just cannot accomplish anything by telling someone who is freaking out to calm down. It is completely futile, and might even make the situation worse. I have enough experience of anxiety myself to know this and know it well.

I think the best that you can hope for is to be there for them when the anxiety wave crashes and they need someone to hold their hand and tell them everything will be okay.

That’s all from me for today, folks. Tomorrow : DAVE.

Further down the road

Nothing in particular in mind tonight. Guess I might as well keep on bitching about my family.

I never really bonded with my Dad much. There was the issue of his temper, which was rarely directed at me (Anne and Dave took the brunt of that abuse) but which nevertheless made me afraid of him and his volatility,

And like I said, you can love someone, or fear them, but not both. Love requires trust and fear is pretty much the opposite of trust. If you fear something, it means you see it as a threat. That’s incompatible with trust.

But there was also the fact that we were just very different people. He tried to get me into the things he was into, but they were mostly the exact sort of hands-on things, like carpentry or fixing things around the house, that I just can’t do. All my talents are on the cerebral track and I am very clumsy with my hands.

And he correctly sensed that while I was always willing to give it a shot if he asked, I really just wanted to get away from him as soon as possible.

Because he scared me. That fear makes every moment in the angry parent’s presence painful because it is fraught with tension. One of our strongest instincts is to flee from that which scares us. It’s a basic survival instinct. And so the angry parent can’t really bond with the kids, no matter how friendly they are, because the kid knows that could change at any second.

Still, despite all he did to me (molestation, taking me out of college, making the whole house a minefield when he was around with his temper), part of me wishes I could go back and try harder to see things from his point of view. I understand how frustrated he must have been by his inability to really connect with his kids, whom he does genuinely love like any father would. The problem was of his own devising, but I understand how painful it must have been to repeatedly try to reach out to us only to have our fear of him and/or his temper push us away.

And of all of us kids, I think I would have been the one most capable of bridging the gap, because I have a unique talent for understanding people, even the unpleasant ones, and I am quite capable of having compassion for the beast.

After all, my father had a nightmarishly bad childhood because of his father, who was Satan, and I am sure that is what fueled the anger, the frustration, and his inability to stand up for himself at work.

I mean, his sister Mary Jane reacted to their depraved and deprived childhood by retreating to a house in the boonies which was so strictly religious and antiseptic that the only things their kids were allowed to watch on TV was tapes of Leave It To Beaver and Father Knows Best.

I swear I am not making that up.

My mother, on the other hand…. it is very hard for me to talk about her. Children of polarized households with an angry parent and a nice but submissive parent invariably end up idolizing the nice parent. My mother is writ deep into the bedrock of my mind, and even thinking about her objectively makes me feel like I am trespassing on sacred ground.

But she played her part in my unhappy childhood as well. She was emotionally absent a lot of the time. Part of that was the terrible injustice of her working full time as a teacher and also being responsible for all the housework. Words cannot express how angry that makes me now.

And this was the normal thing back in the Seventies. Women were just happy they were finally allowed to have jobs. They certainly weren’t about to rock the boat by suggesting their husbands pick up the fucking slack.

So my mother was tired a lot of the time. I think she was also depressed, though I doubt she would agree. But I remember her basically going through life in this zombie-like state, like the burdens of life were so heavy that all she could manage was to sleepwalk through it.

And that sounds like a kind of depression to me. Life was a very hard slog for my mother when I was a kid and she was working full time and looking after four kids and an idle at home husband at the same time. And I think it really took its toll on her.

How I wish I could go back and not just volunteer to help with the housework (which I did many times, only to be rebuffed because she didn’t want to invest the effort in teaching me to do things), but insist on doing the housework and make my siblings and my father take up more of the load as well.

We were a family of six, and many hands make light work. It would have been a small price to pay to get the mother I had when I was a tiny tot back. The sweet, attentive, kind woman who delighted in teaching me new things.

The woman who sat me down beside her and we would sing songs from her guitar books while she strummed her guitar. The woman who showed me how our back yard garden worked. The woman who read me Huckleberry Finn, both Alice books, and all of the Chronicles of Narnia books, and did all the voices as well.

She gave me all that is good within me, and I will always treasure her for that. She taught me compassion and kindness and curiosity and gave me a thirst for knowledge and understanding that has never left me.

I think if I had been raised by that version of her, whether or not she had gone back to work, I would have been a much stronger and more confident person.

Maybe a bit of a Mama’s-boy, but there are worse fates.

Well, that’s all from me for today, folks. Thanks so much for reading this.

Seeya tomorrow, faithful readers!